Tag Botany
Spring’s arrival provides reassurance
With the COVID-19 crisis roiling life on campus and all over the world, it's reassuring to see that spring arrived on Thursday, March 19. This year's spring equinox arrived early, and it was welcome.
Greenhouse a refuge from winter woes
There’s a place you can go to escape the snow, the cold and the watery gray of a Wisconsin winter. Not California or Florida, but somewhere right here on campus. The Botany Greenhouse in Birge Hall is an 8,000-square-foot oasis of warmth and greenery. Remember green?
Lifelike chemistry created in lab search for ways to study origin of life
The work is far from jumpstarting life in the lab. Yet, it shows that simple laboratory techniques can spur the kinds of reactions that are likely necessary to explain how life got started on Earth some four billion years ago.
‘Foray’ draws scientists to Wisconsin in search of mushrooms, fellowship
Now in its 44th year, the Smith Lake States Mycological Foray gathers mushroom experts to collect samples, share mycological gossip and debate the evolution of these enigmatic organisms.
Autumn fades on the prairie
The final days of fall bring their own unique colors and textures, stark yet lovely, to the Curtis Prairie at UW–Madison's Arboretum.
Researchers find value in unusual type of plant material
UW-Madison scientists have shown that a recently-discovered variety of lignin, catechyl lignin (C-lignin), has attributes that could make it well-suited as the starting point for a range of bioproducts.
In dangerous fungal family’s befriending of plants, a story of loss
Researchers show that gene loss — not the evolution of new genes — helped drive the fly amanita mushroom into its symbiotic relationship with plants.
Blazes of light reveal how plants signal danger long distances
The plants produce a protein that only fluoresces around calcium, letting the researchers track its presence and concentration. Then came caterpillar bites, scissor cuts and crushing wounds.
An ocean apart, carnivorous pitcher plants create similar communities
Asian pitchers transplanted to Massachusetts bogs can mimic the living communities of natives so well that the pitcher plant mosquito — a specialized insect that evolved to complete its life cycle exclusively in North American pitchers — lays eggs in the impostors, new research shows.
Greenhouses contend with the climate to keep plants growing
The university's greenhouses, which include plants from all over the world, provide study material for botany and horticulture courses and the precisely controlled climates required for research experiments.
UW researcher to send cotton into space to improve its growth on Earth
Botanist Simon Gilroy will study cotton seedlings grown on the International Space Station in a project that could help researchers understand how to develop plants that use water more efficiently.
Valuable potato specimens transferred to Wisconsin State Herbarium
A large collection of potato specimens have been transferred from the U.S. Potato Genebank in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, to the Wisconsin State Herbarium at UW–Madison, which has 1.3 million specimens.
UW researchers discover an evolutionary stepping stone to beet-red beets
The new findings can aid beet breeding programs and provide tools and information for scientists studying how to turn tyrosine into its many useful derivatives, which include morphine and vitamin E.
Pregnancy loss and evolution of sex linked by cellular line dance
UW-Madison scientist Dan Levitis’ quest led to a discovery that helps explain why so many plants and animals lose so many offspring. The villain? Meiosis.
Longtime botany greenhouse director Mo Fayyaz to retire
Mo Fayyaz is retiring in August after 33 years as the distinguished director of the botany department greenhouse and botanical gardens.
Peanut family secret for making chemical building blocks revealed
As you bite into your next peanut butter and jelly sandwich, chew on this: The peanut you’re eating has a secret.
Rediscovered mosses document changing Wisconsin landscape
The Wisconsin State Herbarium at the University of Wisconsin–Madison has discovered a collection of more than 2,000 mosses from the turn of the 20th century, lost to time in a cabinet inside Birge Hall, where the herbarium is housed.
New center brings together biologists, engineers to improve crops
The phenotyping center at the Wisconsin Crop Innovation Center aims to develop new ways to measure plants and address novel questions about what factors influence crop performance.
Experiments test how easy life itself might be
UW scientists are trying to understand how life could arise from lifelike chemical reactions under the right conditions, with implications for understanding how common life might be in the universe.
Hugh Iltis, UW’s ‘battling botanist,’ dies at 91
Passionate, articulate and informed, Iltis was opinionated, sometimes argumentative, but always a fearless defender of the natural world he revered.